Hello and welcome to Overthink,
the podcast where two philosophy professors connect big ideas to everyday life.
In this case,
one's concerning the four elements because we are in the middle of our four elements series.
I'm David Peña Guzman.
And I'm Ellie Anderson.
When thinking about the Earth,
I feel like it's hard to distinguish Earth as element from Earth as planet and Earth as world.
We're going to be getting into some of those.
differences in the episode today but we do have a world episode already david's um and i think like also when we're talking about earth as element it's not exactly the planet right it's more correct yeah i mean
as we talked about already in our water episode the idea of the four elements comes from ancient greek philosophy and doesn't really make a whole lot of scientific sense but It's a fun little theme for these episodes.
Interestingly, though, like Earth is the only planet, if we're speaking planets for a hot second,
in the solar system that etymologically derives from Old English or Germanic and not from Greco-Roman mythology.
So the Old English word from which we get Earth,
it's literally spelled in a way that I truly won't attempt to pronounce,
including a letter I've never seen before.
So it means ground, soil, dirt, dry land.
We're also country and district.
And it can also mean the material world, the abode of man,
like as opposed to the heavens or the underworld.